The perception of sounds without the existence of an internal or external sound source is called subjective tinnitus. A tinnitus is an often chronic illness and generally occurs with a constant individual tinnitus frequency. The physiological cause for this is usually an abnormal neuronal activity in the primary auditory cortex.
A possible therapy for relieving a subjective tinnitus is based on the approach of reducing the abnormal neuronal activity in the auditory cortex using lateral inhibition and thereby initiating therapeutically effective normalization of this neuronal activity based on neuronal plasticity.
Lateral inhibition is thereby in particular a characteristic circuitry of the nerve cells in the central nerve system, which causes certain nerve cells to be stimulated in a peripheral stimulus and the activity of different nerve cells is inhibited for the perception of comparable stimuli.
The therapy correspondingly consists of listening to sounds or music, in which the frequency portions were filtered out in the range of the tinnitus frequency. For example, white noise is used for this, from which therapeutic data can be generated for any tinnitus frequencies because white noise has a very broad and even frequency spectrum. White noise is however considered bothersome and unpleasant by the patient in the long run. Willingness to use the therapy regularly and permanently is thereby reduced.
Music is more pleasant to listen to, whereby up until now only professionally produced music with a particularly high audio quality was considered suitable. Since moreover an individual processing for each individual patient is required, a patient generally only has a few different music pieces available for the therapy. These often do not meet the personal tastes of the patient.